The Norwegian energy experience abroad

Norwegian authorities, NGOs and businesses have through aid and trade exported "the Norwegian Model" for energy production to other countries.

The Norwegian knowledge on energy production exported

Norwegian authorities, NGOs and businesses have attempted to sell or establish energy technologies and production, or to export the Norwegian Model for energy production, management and energy policies. At the TIK centre we have research projects concerning how businesses, NGOs and governmental organisations such as UD and Norad initiate and implement projects in other parts of the World.

Publikasjoner og avhandlinger

Does foreign aid work? Are aid funds spent as intended? These have been recurring questions for four decades, and they continue to spark heated debates. Yet how may we know whether aid works? What tools may help us see clearly the effects of aid?

This PhD thesis shows how these questions were first introduced into Norwegian aid around 1980, and how evaluation staff contributed to a major transformation of aid by developing new tools for planning, monitoring, and evaluation. Yet paradoxically, this thesis argues, when these tools were combined with methods of auditable accounting from 1990, they reinforced the same situation that evaluation staff had so strongly criticized one decade earlier.

Through archival research and close reading of documents, this thesis analyzes aid evaluation as a specific form of knowledge production. Combining historical methods with theoretical and methodological approaches from Science and Technology Studies, the thesis develops the concept of optics of evaluation as a means to analyze the practical methods, tools, technologies, routines, and systems that the aid administration devised in their efforts to better see the effects of aid.

In her PhD project, Lysgård studies links between commercial businesses and politics in Norway today. She focuses on contemprorary empirical data, such as cases that create special interest and disagreement in the Norwegian public debate.

The Norwegian Oil Experience - Helge Ryggvik

The Norwegian oil policy is regarded by many as the only successful example where a country, after discovering oil, has built a competent national oil industry, yet still has managed to maintain an egalitarian welfare state.

Does Norway deserve such praise? Do other nations really have anything to learn from the Norwegian oil experience? What exactly is the Norwegian oil experience?